Say you want to give a 50 question multiple choice test. First make up two or three questions of similar difficulty for each "slot" on the exam. Now use a pseudo-random number generator to generate a "unique" test for each student by picking just one of the candidate questions for each slot, also use the random number generator to shuffle the answers so the correct one differs from one paper to the next. Include the seed for the random number generator on the test paper and have the student enter it onto the scantron answer sheet. Then you just need a smart scanner to check the answers based on which set of questions the student was given.

Cheating is still possible, but much harder because students can no longer send simple "Q23:B" messages, instead they need to send the complete question and answer (which may be a waste of time as that question may not even be on the recipient's copy of the exam).

The 10240 core system is a 20 node cluster with 512 cores on each node (Columbia cluster at NASA).

These big SGI systems prove little about the general scalability of Linux as they are all running HPC (high performance computing) workloads - read in some data, crunch floating point numbers for several hours then printf("42\n") at the end of the run. I.e. not stuff that will stress the scalability of the operating system.

Take one of those systems and have it run a workload where all the cpus are trying to create/write/read/close on a bunch of small files, and you'll soon see how poorly they scale for general purpose workloads.

Catch someone texting while driving - impound their car and tow it away. We already do this for people who are too drunk to drive. This just does the same for people who are too stupid to be allowed to drive.

Take the phone away too.

If they do decide to drop the printed version - then there seems to be little point in waiting 10 years until they "complete" the current edition before publishing it. They could simply release any completed sections into the online version at whatever frequency made sense.

1) Record anything broadcast for replay later
2) Easy edit to trim off commercials from recordings
3) TiVo style back-up & replay of last 30 minutes
4) One-touch sample for use as ring tone
5) One-touch e-mail of recorded samples to friends
6) One-touch sharing of recorded samples on social media

All of these look pretty easy to implement. I'm sure that NAB and RIAA will just *love* that all this flexibility will be available to every smart phone user.

There are plenty of precedents for laws that make discrimination illegal. Have any of these been challenged with this 5th amendment argument? E.g. there are anti-discrimination housing laws that (attempt to) prevent landlords from discriminating when renting out properties.

"I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media"

s/excited/amazed/

I seem to remember that some candidates used copyrighted music as the soundtrack for their campaign videos without permission of the rights holder. Holding them up as a shining example of all that is good and right about non-infringing use of You-Tube clearly does not match with recent history.

Just got a pop-up from Quicken 2007 telling me that it will cease down-loading data from my bank at the end of April. If I want to keep being able to do this, then I'll have to upgrade to Quicken 2010.

This is the second time that Intuit have made an incompatible change to the download data format (at least while I've been using it). So I'm going to assume that their business plan now includes a forced upgrade every three or so years. Time to start researching non-evil alternatives.

Here's the seven criteria from the bill itself. I'll attempt
to save the goverment the $154.5M evaluation cost by doing it
here for free:

(A) protection of personal privacy,
GPS in every vehicle and RFID at the roadside to scan vehicles as they pass.
This one ought to just be a deal killer right away. Anyone who cannot think
of five ways that this will erode personal privacy shouldn't be allowed to
write new laws.

(B) ease of compliance,
How many vehicles are on the US roads today? How many are added/removed each
day? What is the MTBF for a car-mounted GPS unit? How many will fail each
day? Who pays to fix them?
How many miles of public roads will need RFID readers? How often will these
fail (or be vandalized/stolen)?

(C) public acceptance,
No just no, but HELL NO!

(D) geographic and income equity,
Poor people can't afford to install GPS in their cars. Large states (TX)
have lots more roads than small states (anything in New England).

(E) integration with State and local transportation
        revenue mechanisms (including demand management systems),
This one has some promise ... but the horse may have already left the
stable. I'd bet money that the existing systems installed in each state
are totally incompatible. Will I have to pick up a new RFID tag at each
state border crossing when I drive on vacation?

(F) administrative, cost, and enforcement issues, and
Minimum administrative unit becomes an individual vehicle. Compare this
against the current fuel tax where the unit is the gas station. There
are three orders of magnitude more vehicles than gast stations. Nuff said.

(G) potential for fraud and evasion.
Yes. Don't believe me ... wait for the first "Black Hat" convention
after this goes live and I'll yell "TOLD YOU SO".

Perhaps we've stumbled across this planet during the last million years of its billion year life-cycle. Sounds like a one in a thousand chance that we'd do that. But the summary says that over 370 exo-planets[1] have been found ... so (waves hands as if doing actual math) its about a 1 in 3 chance that one of the planets we've found so far will be in some one in a thousand situation.

Wait until Kepler starts kicking in a few thousand more exo-planets to the database. Then we'll see even more "impossible" situations.

[1] http://exoplanets.org/ says the current tally is just 358

"Let's all get up and dance to a song
That was a hit before your mother was born.
Though she was born a long, long time ago"

Released in November 1967.

My wife was born in September 1967 ... so the "before your mother was born" is off, but only by a couple of months.

My daughter is 11 ... she knows who The Beatles are, and tolerates their music.

If AT&T U-verse is available in your area, then you can get a box that does that today. IIRC the DVR uses ~20W when running and drops to 13W in standby. Not fabulous ... but a whole lot better than 40W all the time that my old Comcast set top box used to use.